Former Eagles guitarist Don Felder has revealed how a “Mexican reggae” demo was the catalyst behind the legendary rockers’ most iconic track, ‘Hotel California’.
Speaking to LouderSound, Felder – who was the lead guitarist for the Eagles from 1974 until 2001 – detailed the process of coming up with the group’s famous 1976 track.
“When I joined the Eagles, my wife Susan and I were living in the mountains overlooking Topanga Canyon, a beautiful, rural area of California,” Felder began.
“One day she put a blanket on the ground outside for our baby boy Jesse to get some sun, and she suddenly saw a rattlesnake crawling towards him. She grabbed Jesse and called me and said, ’We’re moving.’ So when I came off the road, I came back not to the house I owned, but to a house she’d rented in Malibu,” Felder explained.
“And that’s where I wrote Hotel California.”
Felder continued: “When I first joined the band, my high school bandmate Bernie Leadon told me, ‘If you want to wrote songs with Don [Henley] and Glenn [Frey], just make musical beds for them, don’t try to give them full songs with lyrics, because that’s their job’. So ahead of making what turned out to be the Hotel California album, I wrote 15 or 16 demo songs, based on that approach.
“Two of them ended up on the record, one of which was ‘Victim Of Love’, and the other which became the title track. Truthfully, at the time, ‘Hotel California’ was just another song on the cassette.
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“I didn’t necessarily thing it was the best song, but Don called me up after a few days living with the music and said, ‘I really like that one that sounds like Mexican reggae’, and I knew which one he meant,” Felder continued.
“So we started kicking around ideas for it. Glenn came up with the original concept of ‘Hotel California’, and then Henley sat down and wrote those fantastic lyrics.
“His lyrics are like little photographs, which, much like reading a book rather than watching a movie, allows you to draw pictures in your mind. ‘On a dark desert highway’, that’s five words, but it already puts a picture in your head: ‘Cold wind in my hair’, you can feel it, you can see it.”
For more on this topic, head over to the Classic Rock Observer.
Check out ‘Hotel California (Live)’ by The Eagles:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vydym4wh9Qo
